The BLM lobby is still dominated by Afro-Caribbeans. More Africans have sympathies with the Conservative Party than Afro-Caribbeans (even if they don’t necessarily vote for them) — just look at Kemi Badenoch. Now, like most Pimlico Journal readers, I have no time at all for her. However, she does have the potential to help obliterate any future prospect of reparations. All she would need to do is ask that Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia foot half the bill for reparations, and black solidarity would immediately dissipate. Very suddenly, the Fulani will see themselves as tanned Tuaregs; the Somali as Cushitic; and Leroy from Montego Bay will forgo his chicken shop Shahada because Moroccan poon tang just isn’t worth that sort of money. Once you distract them from the easy punching bag that is the white man, they can start fighting each other; meritocracy sorts the rest out.
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December 11th, 2024 | One comment
 Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet. When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try. December 10th, 2024 | 26 comments
The brutal Assad regime has collapsed. That is one on the eye for Russia, always a good thing, seeing the end of the Russian navy’s only base in the Mediterranean. And one in the eye for Iran, also a good thing, meaning they have little to no ability to continue supporting what is left of Hezbollah… but the motley crew who have toppled the Ba’athist Syrian regime have more than a few black ISIS/Al-Qaeda flags in their midst, so regardless of very conciliatory statements by HTS towards Syria’s non-Islamic population and even Israel, it remains to be seen how this will shake out. As a side note: when Patricia Marins predicted the rebel offensive would go nowhere, I became confident the rebels were headed for victory a week ago 😀 December 8th, 2024 | 56 comments
I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?” It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news. So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion. December 6th, 2024 | 40 comments
And not just “on the agenda” in general, on today’s agenda at the European Council, “where national ministers from each EU country meet to negotiate and adopt EU laws”. They never give up, and with “they” being the European Union, they only have to win once. Tech Radar reports,
That’s today, kids.
December 6th, 2024 | 7 comments
Whether Jaguar’s new electric car flops as a result of all this remains to be seen. It would hardly be surprising if Jaguar’s traditional audience – the people who actually buy its cars – give up on the company in response to all this insufferable virtue-signalling. After bending the knee so readily to the trans cause, that would be the least Jaguar deserves. December 5th, 2024 | 29 comments
What might ChatGPT or other such tools derive from an analysis of the Samizdata blog post archives? To focus this on something timely: ask it to do the analysis and propose policy ideas for the new Trump Administration, ideas consistent with the perspectives and ideas of the Samizdatista community. Or at least the broad consensus of that community about liberty and limited, less regulatory government. There are other ways this might be posed to an AI, e.g., “which proposed policies of the Trump administration are consistent with the broad governance perspectives at Samizdata.net and why? Which are not and why?” How would you set up such an analysis to have the model have the best chance at producing something useful? I am not interested in an experiment that assesses if ChatGPT is a good model for this or a good model in general–I want a good analysis! If the product of such an inquiry was not compelling to enough samizdatistas, if it did not pass a laugh test, we stop there. Maybe there is a better choice of large language model than ChatGPT; maybe ChatGPT is not optimized for this sort of analysis but other models are? If you have some knowledge here, please chime in! December 4th, 2024 | 29 comments
I did not see this coming: “South Korea’s president declares emergency martial law”, reports the BBC. Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, is quoted as saying, “Our National Assembly has become a haven for criminals, a den of legislative dictatorship that seeks to paralyse the judicial and administrative systems and overturn our liberal democratic order.” Sounds like projection to me. Can anyone explain what is going on? Is there really any more of a threat from North Korea than there always is, or is it all to do with domestic politics? Update: Lawmakers in South Korea vote to lift the martial law decree. The Guardian link says,
Much depends on which 190 lawmakers were present. If the very fact that they were still in the parliament building after martial law was declared was because they they were from the opposition, President Yoon will dismiss it – although the 190 being an absolute majority of South Korea’s MPs does give their vote moral weight. If it was a broad spread of MPs from several parties, this vote might mean the end of the coup. Either way, it is troubling to realise that a country that everyone thought was a stable democracy isn’t. Did democracy stop being cool or something? December 3rd, 2024 | 22 comments
As a good libertarian, I feel I ought to like the emphasis that the Montessori method of education places on giving children maximum freedom. On the other hand, what I said on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 was – what is that word they used to use? – that’s it, right.
It would save you time to take my word for it, but, if you are so inclined, you can click on the link to my old blog to discover my reasons #1, #2, #3a, #3b and #0 for saying that teachers consistently overestimate the effectiveness of discovery learning. The individual links no longer work; you’ll have to scroll down. The process will be good for your soul. So why am I sitting here wincing as I think about the Montessori method for the first time in decades? Because of these three tweets that form part of a long thread by Samantha Joy, an advocate of the Montessori system. She writes,
True? Or just true for the sort of anti-social little freaks who were destined to still own the set of felt tip pens* they got at the age of ten half a century later? *Most of which still write. That’s because I put the lids on properly. December 2nd, 2024 | 26 comments
Macroeconomic management doesn’t work because the data available to do detailed macroeconomic management is shit. Therefore let’s not try doing detailed macroeconomic management. Get the basics right, the incentives, markets, then leave be. Of course, this then leaves a paucity of jobs for economists but then as I’m not one of them why would I give that proverbial? December 1st, 2024 | 20 comments
There are many good Joe Rogan podcasts and this week’s episode with Mark Andreessen as the guest (opens Spotify if you have it) is right up there among them. I have to confess I didn’t know who Mark Andreessen was beforehand and I didn’t know who he was afterwards. Something in the Valley I guess but what he had to say – assuming it’s true of course – was dynamite. Government persecution of crypto, AI and anyone else it didn’t like. The government making Americans fat. Isn’t it odd how the health bureaucrats all look so unhealthy? I’m not sure about that one to be honest. Further research needed. Also, the importance of Elon Musk in not only giving us normies a voice but also the tech sector.
November 30th, 2024 | 14 comments
“I honestly don’t understand how it can be so hard to cut immigration. The government has and has long had all the tools it needs at hand to actually do it – if it actually wants to. Especially as only around 25% of visas are actually work visas. I wonder if the way forward is just to give responsibility for incoming workers to companies. If they need workers [that they] can’t find in the U.K. they can hire abroad, sponsor, house and finance them within a 3-5 year circular visa system. [This] Takes stress of public services especially the NHS and housing; it allows workers to make money to take home and reduces long-term numbers. Japan has a system much like this.” – Merryn Somerset Webb, columnist. These comments appeared on her Linkedin page. While many on the free market side of the fence can be at odds on the immigration issue, what seems plain to me is that controlling legal immigration ought to be pretty straightforward if that is the policy. So why is this so hard to do in practice? I cannot help but think that it is a lack of political will, and an element of resistance to enforce democratically-enacted policy at the level of the Civil Service. In which case, it is no wonder that the Conservatives got crushed in July and that, on current trends, the current shower in government will go the same way.
November 29th, 2024 | 29 comments
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